Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died To Save Image

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: December 30, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency's every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived -- by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations -- and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency's clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the service's director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

The Justice Department, the C.I.A.'s inspector general and Congress are investigating whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged their destruction and whether the C.I.A. deliberately hid them from the national Sept. 11 commission.

But interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes.

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency's top lawyers and its inspector general. The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials.

''You couldn't have more than one or two analysts in the room,'' said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.'s No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. ''You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top Al Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.''

Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started?

''By that time,'' Mr. Krongard said, ''paranoia was setting in.''

The Decision to Tape

By several accounts, the decision to begin taping Abu Zubaydah and another detainee suspected of being a Qaeda operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was made in the field, with several goals in mind.

First, there was Abu Zubaydah's precarious condition. ''There was concern that we needed to have this all documented in case he should expire from his injuries,'' recalled one former intelligence official.

Just as important was the fact that for many years the C.I.A. had rarely conducted even standard interrogations, let alone ones involving physical pressure, so officials wanted to track closely the use of legally fraught interrogation methods. And there was interest in capturing all the information to be gleaned from a rare resource -- direct testimony from those who had attacked the United States.

But just months later, the taping was stopped. Some field officers had never liked the idea. ''If you're a case officer, the last thing you want is someone in Washington second-guessing everything you did,'' said one former agency veteran.

More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner's mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Correction: January 5, 2008, Saturday
A picture caption with an article on Sunday about the motivations of the C.I.A. in taping some interrogations and then destroying the tapes misidentified the position held by John A. Rizzo at the intelligence agency. He serves as the acting general counsel; he was never confirmed by the Senate as general counsel. (The White House withdrew his nomination because of mounting opposition from Democrats over Mr. Rizzo's role in the harsh interrogation of C.I.A. detainees.)